Facebook Advertisers Complain Of A Wave Of Fake Likes Rendering Their Pages Useless

Derek Muller, who
discovered his Facebook page had up to 70,000 fake
likes.Derek
Mullen

Legitimate companies are being flooded with fake Likes on
Facebook — and they're being generated in part by abuse of
Facebook's own advertising tools.

It's complicated, but here is how it works: Facebook lets people
promote their pages with advertising tools called
“Suggested Posts” or “Suggested Pages.” For small sums of money,
companies with a few hundred fans can dramatically increase the
reach of their Facebook material so it gets seen by thousands of
new users. Prices for these campaigns can cost as little as $50.

The problem is that —
according to four Page owners who
have complained publicly
about it — the incoming extra likes generated by the campaign
are mostly fake. A company can accumulate thousands of new fans
only to see engagement on their page drop because the new fans
are fake, abusive accounts run from click farms in Egypt or
India.

From there, the problem gets worse: Facebook does not have a tool
that lets people delete fake followers in bulk. You have to do it
individually. And for companies with thousands of fake fans, this
is logistically difficult. The result is that after advertising
on Facebook, companies are left with pages overwhelmed by useless
followers — and all their metrics become distorted.

Legitimate ads created fake likes

The twist here is that these advertisers have not paid for fake
likes. They paid Facebook for legit ads.

And the fake likes themselves don't benefit anybody. Rather, they
have been created en masse by click farms attempting to make
their abusive accounts look real by clicking on legit ads. When a
company advertises, asking for likes, the spammers respond and
click on them to help their own appearance of legitimacy.

For these marketers advertising on Facebook is worse than useless
— it renders their pages pointless.

Facebook has an ongoing campaign to root out abusive accounts. In
its annual report, the company said between approximately
0.4% and 1.2% of all active users are abusive accounts that
create fake likes.

Facebook told Business Insider:

We're always focused on maintaining the integrity of our site,
but we've placed an increased focus on abuse from fake accounts
recently. We've made a lot of progress by building a combination
of automated and manual systems to block accounts used for
fraudulent purposes and Like button clicks. We also take action
against sellers of fake clicks and help shut them down.

"For $50, we ended purchasing 900 empty likes that we still can’t
get rid of to this day."

Here are some examples of companies that have fallen victim to
the fake like plague.

We had about 100 “likes” from our science friends and decided to
pay for promotion to accumulate more. This exercise (and the
resulting “likes”) is still the most puzzling event in the
two-year existence of our startup. For $50, we ended purchasing
900 empty likes that we still can’t get rid of to this day.

... We stopped our campaign right away, but it was too late.
Facebook has no interface to remove these fake likes. You have to
manually delete each follower and can only do so for a few dozen
most recent ones. There is no way to clear the likes beyond the
most recent. So, we got stuck with our following, and that means
that it is senseless for us to promote any content on Facebook at
this point.

Naturally, this experience would be disastrous for Facebook if it
becomes widespread. Facebook has 1 million companies as clients
who use both its free tools and its paid campaigns. The vast
majority of them are relatively unsophisticated small and medium
sized businesses who do not have time to patrol fake likes.

“The outward appearance to my real fans will be that I bought a
s--tload of fake likes."

“[At first it was] 500 or 1,000 likes per day, then eventually up
to 15,000 likes per day,” Bob said. “The growth was awesome at
first and it seemed like we were connecting with a whole new
audience.”

... “The outward appearance to my real fans will be that I bought
a s--tload of fake likes, which isn’t the case and will be
severely damaging to the social media aspect of my business,” he
said. “And those people who actually paid for the reach, without
knowing, actually did buy fake likes!

All the fake likes came from users in developing countries that
had no genuine reason for going near his page.

Our analysis shows that it may be a issue for company pages which
have grown quickly through advertising, with as much as 40% of
the ‘likes’ being suspected fakes in our estimation. Here we give
best practices for avoiding this problem.

"Consider suspending all Facebook page advertising."

Here are Comprendia's specific recommendations for shutting down
Facebook ads:

... Consider suspending all Facebook page advertising until the
company puts a stop to this fraud. Our eyes have been opened in
doing this analysis, we are going to proceed much more cautiously
with Facebook advertising now.